What if changing one small field could increase your conversion rate to the tune of millions of dollars a year – do such things exist?

According to Expedia, the answer is a resounding yes – by adjusting on simple field on their checkout form they were able to increase their site PROFIT by $12 million a year.

How did they do it?

“We had an optional field on the site under ‘Name’, which was ‘Company’ . . . After we realized that we just went onto the site and deleted that field – overnight there was a step function [change], resulting in $12m of profit a year, simply by deleting a field.”

Why was changing this field so critical?

“It confused some customers who filled out the ‘Company’ field with their bank name. After putting in their bank name, these customers then went on to enter the address of their bank, rather than their home address, in the address field.”

This example illustrates that at LEAST half the battle in website optimization is understanding the points of friction that your users are experiencing.

1) UserTesting.com – For less than $100 you can have three complete strangers go through your website, attempt to perform a task, and listen to their annotation and observe them through a screen capture. Watching users flounder through your meticulously designed website is a humbling process, but invaluable to understand where your friction points are. A similar service that’s newer to us is userlytics.com which provides all of the above, but also includes video of the facial response of users on your site.

2) UserFly.com– UserFly is the more macro-version of UserTesting – this system allows you to watch as live user sessions play out on your site, and dig into the data.

3) ClickTale.com– Incredible set of tools, the “attention heatmaps” in particular have provided us with double digit conversion insights on a regular basis, well worth the price of admission.

Finally, worth a mention is a newer tool that has disruptive potential – GazeHawk.com provides eye-tracking studies for less than $50.00.

Online solutions like CrazyEgg.com mimic the functionality without being as exacting, and most traditional eye-tracking vendors rely on expensive hardware solutions and charge 10 – 20x that fee.

Mind if I ask you all a question? I’m wrapping up a website redesign for a small business that generates all of its leads online.

I would love to hear your professional opinion on jquery lightbox/fancybox contact forms. I for one think they’re terrible for conversion rates, but my design guy insist they’re the next best thing. I’m advocating for placing the contact form visibly on each page.

Awesome, that’s what I was hoping to hear. We employed lightbox-style forms on our website once and conversions tanked. I wasn’t sure if it was something we did wrong or what, but it’s good to hear that from you guys.

About Conversion Voodoo

Our online optimization methodologies aren't based on theory. We've been in the trenches like you, creating and running online marketing campaigns for our clients for over 10 years.

Since the beginning, our clients' profits have gone through the roof -- accounting for more than 100 million dollars in sales.
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